Battered Fish
Is there a more archetypal British dish than fish and chips? According to the National Federation Of Fish Friers (NFFF), there are around 10,500 specialist fish and chip shops in the UK serving 167 million portions of Britain’s traditional favourite meal a year to Brits who spend £1.2 billion for the pleasure. 80% of us visit a fish and chip shop at least once a year and 22% make the trip every week. Although it can be eaten on the move, 52% of people buy fish and chips to eat at home as a family meal.
However, the future of fish and chips is far from rosy with the NFFF predicting that as many as a third of chippies could close while Sarsons, the malt vinegar manufacturer, are gloomier still, estimating that a half will go out of business. The reason is down to the significant rise in the cost of energy prices and of the principal ingredients, fish and potatoes, which means that fish and chips is no longer a cheap and wholesome option for many family budgets.
While a quintessentially British dish the origins of battered fish can be traced to Jewish culinary traditions. As cooking was not allowed on the Jewish Sabbath, Sephardic Jews in the Iberian peninsula would prepare meals on the Friday afternoon that would stay fresh over the next 24 hours, one of which was a white fish, usually cod or haddock, fried in a thin coat of flour or matzo meal. The batter preserved the fish which could be eaten cold without losing too much of its flavour.
After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the diaspora resulted in the introduction of some of their customs to other parts of Europe, including Britain. Jewish immigrants to England would sell fish in the streets from trays hung from their necks with leather straps. Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1781) discussed “the Jews’ way of preserving all sorts of fish” while in 1824 the Morning Chronicle previwing a fight between Barney “champion of the twelve tribes” Aaron and Peter Warren, which was to last twenty-nine rounds, noted that Aaron’s Jewish supporters came from an “area around Petticoat Lane in East London [that] was occupied with frying fish”.
In Oliver Twist (1837), Charles Dickens refers to “fried fish warehouses” where bread or baked potatoes were served alongside fish, a forerunner of the chippie. In 1845 Alexis Soyer included a recipe for “Fried Fish, Jewish Fashion” in his A Shilling Cooking For The People, which was fish dipped into a batter of flour and water and then fried.
Two technological transformations enabled fried fish to break free from the narrow confines of east London. The advent of industrial-scale trawler fishing and a national rail network enabled fresh and inexpensive fish to be transported to all parts of the country. By 1860 Joseph Malin, an Ashkenazi Jew borrowing Sephardic traditions, had opened what might have been the first fish and chip shop as we know it at 78, Cleveland Way within the sounds of Bow Bells, selling fish “fried in the Jewish way”.
All we now needed was chips!
